Contact Lens Wearers Have More Bacteria on Eye Lids

Cause of Blepharitis and Conjunctivitis. Blepharitis – Inflammation of the eyelids often are caused by bacterial, viral or mites infections in the eye lid and conjunctiva. Another words, do contact lens wearers have higher incidence of Blepharitis and Conjunctivitis?

A team of researchers at New York University Langone has reported identification of a diverse set of microorganisms in the eyes of daily contact lens wearers that more closely resembles the group of microorganisms of their eyelid skin than the bacterial grouping typically found in the eyes of non-wearers. The researchers found that the conjunctiva has surprisingly higher bacterial diversity than the skin directly beneath the eye, and three times the usual proportion of Methylobacterium, Lactobacillus, Acinetobacter, and Pseudomonas bacteria in the eyes of their study’s nine contact lens wearers than is typically found on the surface of the eyeballs of 11 other men and women in the study who did not wear contact lenses. When measured and plotted on a graph, statistical germ diversity scores showed that the eye microbiome of contact lens wearers had a composition more similar to that of the wearer’s skin than the eye microbiome of non-lens wearers.

This work was presented at the recent annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans. More information can be found at Science Daily.